Carla Saulter has been living without a car—and using public transit as her primary form of transportation—since March of 2003. Though she gave up driving because of concerns about the detrimental effects of car culture (pollution, traffic, sprawl), the decision has profoundly and positively changed her life. Some of these positive changes include: enforced exercise, time to read, reduced expenses, and contact with her community on a level that would never have been possible in the isolated bubble of a single-occupancy vehicle.

Speaking of trains…

Here, in a city pretty much no one would regard as cutting-edge (the girls are still wearing tube-tops; the guys still favor large wire-framed Dick Cheney glasses), light rail has managed to take thousands of cars off the road. Surveys found that nearly 50% of light rail riders switched to transit from cars, and that more than 25% of commuters to the city center get there by transit. Light rail ridership here has been 60 percent higher than projections.